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Operating Systems Software Linux

Modern Linux Distribution for (Very) Old Computers 79

Posted by timothy from the daddy-what-were-floppy-drives dept.
macemoneta writes "The blueflops floppy-based distribution may be just what many Slashdot users are looking for, to revive old hardware. This is a 2.6.11-7 kernel based tiny distribution, that runs very well on my ancient 486sx25 with just 8MB of RAM. It's text-mode only, at the moment, but it does support hard drive installation, and includes an ssh2 client (dropbear)! Many distributions have moved away from boot floppy support, indicating that the 2.6 kernel is just too big. This distribution proves that where there's a will, there's a way."
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Modern Linux Distribution for (Very) Old Computers More

Modern Linux Distribution for (Very) Old Computers

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  • My first post is really a first post ! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by aneeshm ( 862723 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:02PM (#12262910)
    This is my first post on Slashdot , and it seems to be really a First Post ! Am I the only one to have achieved this ? On the other hand , this is good news , because I have a friend with a 486 , who wants to use it as a toy , but cannot , becuase no modern OS can run on it .
    • first two posts and first two modding downs .Welcome to slashdot -

      It could make a rather nice router if the thing isnt too bulky and you can find an ethernet card or two to go in it (I assume ISA slots) you can also pick up the RAM for probably nothing at local PC shops as they tend to stock pile stuff like this .

      if however he wants to use it as a test bed for learning linux then go ahead this distro seems perfect. you could even get it running X11 with a minimalist window manager for your gui fix if you try.
      Certainly would make an excelent project for getting to grips with the system. I cut my x86 teeth on a 386 and later a 486dx so i have fond memorys of those days , that and doom when i was running dos ... i digress .

      Other than that if you want a more productive toy , you can cheap old macs (greybox ppc) or pentium 1 or 2s for next to nothing(ive picked up a couple from people for 0.00).

      I really do love distros such as these , they are to me the spirit of linux ,running on the older systems right up to a 64 cpu server.
      • FreeDOS is nice (though about 20 years too late... isn't that always the way?). How about ELKS [sourceforge.net] though? It's a 16-bit version of Linux, more or less. The project doesn't seem very active at the moment.

        Of course, Minix is now free software...

  • Dumb terminals... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bcmm ( 768152 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:09PM (#12262954)
    OK so X would be nice, but we can still use those old boxes as SSH clients.

    Nethack, anyone?

    • Re:Dumb terminals... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by bcmm ( 768152 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:11PM (#12262971)
      Oooohhh...

      I forgot aaxine... Would a LAN have the bandwidth to watch DVDs over SSH with aaxine running on the server side?

      • Re:Dumb terminals... (Score:3, Informative)

        by m50d ( 797211 )
        100mbps is equal to a 9x dvd, which I think is a bit more than the compression factor for mpeg. So you could probably do it in full colour with svgalib or something.
        • The issue isnt the network its the ram/processing power. mpeg compression needs ~200mhz to decompress a decent quality stream. If its running a dynamic protocol such as X11 or vnc which compresses and decompresses in real time even the fastest systems couldnt really do that effectively. Another issue is that very few network cards can run high utilization without cpu utilization.
          • That was why I mentioned mpeg compression ratio. 9x is probably enough to decompress the video server-side, then use an uncompressed streaming protocol (I'm sure vlc has something) to send it to the 486 which can just blit it to the screen
      • I've watched DVDs over SMBFS in a 100baseT network. It played fine.

    • Re:Dumb terminals... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Pandora's Vox ( 231969 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:12PM (#12262978) Homepage Journal
      dumb terminals being the excuse of old hardware addicts everywhere :-)

      seriously, how many dumb terminals do you need?!?
      • *Looks left sees 2 ,looks right and sees another one* .. um about 3 less than i currently have most likely .I couldnt bare to part with them. I guess its that colecting instinct , im sure one of these days im going to need them... .honestly ... um.....how much will it take to make this conversation go away before my wife reads it and finds out i really dont need them.
      • Like, lots! (No, I don't really have any :-)

        It's more the (valid) excuse for people decreasing resources consumption in applications, though this distro is a bit over-the-top.

        If this is actually 2.6, a lot of stuff has got to have been removed from the .config... Why not start with 2.4? Will it not fully support the hardware?

        This will run SO FAST on a nice new machine with 64MB RAM and a 133Mhz Pentium, won't it?

      • Okay, I don't need any dumb terminals. I don't need computers. I can get everything I need on 10 acres of land: food, clothing, shelter, and even raise offspring on it. (If I can find a girl willing to breed with an uneducated guy who lives in a one room cabin)

        I want more though. I having like the ability to read. I like lights that come on with just a flick of a switch. I like getting fresh fish and vegetables flown in, in the middle of winter. I like heat that I don't need to tend myself. I lik

      • seriously, how many dumb terminals do you need?!?

        That depends... how dumb are they???

        How many of them would it take to screw in a lightbulb?

  • It's definately not a stock kernel... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bergeron76 ( 176351 ) * on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:17PM (#12263015) Homepage
    They proabably had to apply the -tiny series of 2.6 kernel patches for embedded systems.

    • No EXT2 support (Score:3, Informative)

      by SpaceLifeForm ( 228190 )
      Just Minix, VFAT, tmpfs.

      If he dropped VFAT, he could add EXT2 and get some space back for other uses.

      • Re:No EXT2 support (Score:3, Insightful)

        by macemoneta ( 154740 )
        You can customize the kernel as you see fit [nic-nac-project.de]. Remember that these old machines typically have hard drives measuring only a few hundred megabytes, so which file system is used isn't all that important (as long as it's stable).
    • Ah... Kernel bloat... As usual with my old 486 I could have all the functionality I wanted and it would still run faster than anything I have now. Trying to use Firefox on a Pentium 150 feels like a painful experience these days, how on earth I used 486DX33+8MB of RAM and Netscape and I was pretty satisfied with the speed and the overall response of the system. I was probably mad.

  • A real use for this.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by zappepcs ( 820751 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:40PM (#12263134) Journal
    A real use for this (if it is possible) is to configure a lot of older hardware into a cluster for cheap cluster computing. I've thought of this a couple of times, and besides the power issues, and the fact that using old obsolete hardware has its own obstacles, if you have the hardware, its perhaps possible to create a couple of racks of clustered computers. I think that being able to use two or more old motherboards per power supply would help make it more realistic. It is indeed interesting to think that in garages across the world, there could be some serious clusters built on cheap hardware. Serious, in this case, does not mean that they will ever be in contention with deepblue, but it would perhaps speak volumes to the people at SETI? Seriously, if you could do this with 12 old pentiums, would it not pave the way to do it with higher processors but keep the OS overheads very low?
    • The problem is, the mathematics and economics of this just don't make sense for most people. Say you do have 12 old Pentiums laying around. 12x133 MHz each, that's only the equivalent of 1600 MHz. You can buy an Athlon XP for $60 that will obliterate this, not even considering that it will have much faster RAM. Seeing that nobody normal would actually have 12 old Pentiums, it would cost less to build a new, better performing, computer. (And be lot less of time investment as well.)
      • I agree that the math is a weak point. I also admit to not knowing the exact formulae for calculating it either. It just seems to make sense that a pentium handling one bit of processing at 100% capacity times 12 is going to be faster than a single processor 12 times as fast as the pentium because of task switching and other OS overheads.

        Does anyone know of any good sites that talk about the math of clustering vs. single processor systems?

      • Say you do have 12 old Pentiums laying around. 12x133 MHz each, that's only the equivalent of 1600 MHz.

        Maybe, but you can still only handle 4 IDE drives (without buying additional rather expensive hardware). I've got 15 IDE drives up and running right now, on machines that I've bought for prices from $3-8 at thrift stores (most of the drives themselves I bought at pretty much full price over the course of many years). Just yesterday I got a Pentium 166 Mhz with a 6 gig hard drive and 256 megs of ram fo

        • You can buy just plain IDE cards for pretty cheap for about $12 each. Add one to your system and you have a total of 8 drives. I am not sure how many IDE adapters you can put on a system so even if it is only one added card per system you would only need two computers for all 15 of your drives.

          • Besides buying the IDE cards I'd have to buy enclosures and power supplies. In the end I'd wind up paying more money for something slower and probably less reliable (IDE is very sensitive about how long the cables are). And I'd be using up expansion slots, which are already full on my primary desktop machine, and which I don't even have on the machine I'm using right now - my laptop. I'd probably save a little bit of money on electricity, though. Never measured just what kind of power these things consu

            • Yea playing with old hardware can be fun but at this time almost anything slower than a PIII is not worth messing with. Funny thing is I just got a PIII 600 running with a low end nVidia AGP card and unbuntu. Guess what? It is plenty fast enough for anything but ripping CDs. It will probably replace my 450mhz k6-2 as my home server. I will miss that K-6 :(

              • Yea playing with old hardware can be fun but at this time almost anything slower than a PIII is not worth messing with.

                Is that supposed to be a joke? I don't have a single computer at or beyond a PIII in my whole house. It doesn't take that much power to run Mozilla and putty.

    • Sorry, but the math doesn't add up. Back when distributed.net was first starting on RC56 I calculated that the cost of electricity to run enough 386s to equal one Pentium pro-200 (Then the fastest chip at the task and you paid for that power) was greater than the cost of the ppro-200 system! I haven't since done the calculations for modern systems, but it still applies.

      That is for a task that scales well to multiple CPUs. Most computer tasks do not scale well to multiprocessor systems. So in the re

      • Not for raw power mind you but for a learning experience.
        If you want to play with clusters, mirroring, or even things like heartbeat a cluster of old cheap systems can be worth setting up. Not for production mind you but for a learning environment.
      • You're comparing a cost to a rate?

        How long were you going to run the systems for? OVer long enough a time frame, even a watt's difference will overcome any purchase price.
  • Why do people waste their time writing software for a 486? Spend $300 and get a new entry-level PC -- and with the time you saved, do something useful.

    • Re:I don't get this one... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That doesn't scale.

      Its everyone spending $300 vs someone writing fast software.

    • Re:I don't get this one... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by linguae ( 763922 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @02:32PM (#12263507)

      Because, believe it or not, a 486 has some good usages. Back in the early 1990s, people were using them with DOS and Windows 3.1 and doing word processing, writing spreadsheets, and other productivity jobs. A 486 with MS-DOS, WordPerfect 5.1, and Lotus 1-2-3 can be very productive. Accessing the Internet is also possible with a 486; no, you're not going to run the latest browser with your Flash animations and Java applets and beautiful CSS stylesheets and the like, but they're adequate for viewing text-based sites, checking e-mail, doing some instant messenging, and some other low-resource tasks.

      Today, people use 486s for many different usages. A 486 can make a very cheap and effective firewall, or for a Linux/BSD test machine. It can even run X and a lightweight window manager fairly well. No, KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice, Java, Firefox, and some other programs aren't going to run at great speeds (you'll need at least a Pentium II for that), but they should do nicely for some very basic tasks. Finally, having a cheap 486 would be pretty nice to explore and to hack.

      I wouldn't run a 486 as a production machine today, but I can see some of the advantages of owning and writing software for it. If you like programming, pulling your 486 out of your closet and installing Linux and some development tools can be a very fun experience. Besides, the more developers who still hack around with their old 486s, the better that it is for everyone who still uses old machines (I'm typing this on a 266MHz Pentium II). Imagine if all of the open source developers assumed that everyone has the latest Pentium 4 or Athlon processor? It wouldn't be a pretty sight for a lot of people who can't afford the latest and greatest.

      • Accessing the Internet is also possible with a 486; no, you're not going to run the latest browser with your Flash animations and Java applets and beautiful CSS stylesheets and the like, but they're adequate for viewing text-based sites,

        Not just text-based sites, either. The Dillo [dillo.org] browser runs great even on a 486, probably even with only 16M of RAM, and renders most sites quite well. It doesn't support plugins like flash or java of course, but still makes for a useful web browsing experience.
      • It's all still RAM that you need.

        Firefox probably wouldn't be at all bad, on a P5 or on a really fast 486.. but.. you'd need a shitfarkload of ram. At least 256MB just to think about it. And I'm not sure if those machiens have that capability

    • 3rd world? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Julian Morrison ( 5575 )
      Three hundred dollars (or local equivalent) is a lot of money to some people. Like eg: very poor people in the third world. The ability to run modern-but-simple productivity apps (and write their own) on seriously antiquated hardware might well make their day. Sort of "simputer" ad hoc. Not to mention, Linux skills might well be worth serious (local) money.
      • $300 is alot of money to me, and I live in the USA, midwest. My wife and I have a rule that anything that costs more the $30-$50 has to be discussed before purchase.

        It's easier to do without or dumpster-dive then it is to put together a proposal that is acceptable to the wife. Plus, I'm usually pretty broke...
    • Perhaps old machines can be used to run distributed computing jobs like Folding@Home? That way, they can contribute *something*.

      The drawbacks of this are that old machines still use the same desk space (or floor space), and almost the same amount of electricity, as newer, more powerful machines.
      • The drawbacks of this are that old machines still use [...] almost the same amount of electricity, as newer, more powerful machines.

        Are you sure about that? After all, modern processors consume so much energy that they need monster coolers, while an old 486 needs no processor cooler at all.
    • There are tons of embedded systems. Many of them run moderns equivalents of older PC CPUs. The instruction set stays the same but the chip is fabricated using modern methods resulting in smaller size and lower power consumption.

  • No Will (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @02:13PM (#12263401) Homepage Journal
    Many distributions have moved away from boot floppy support, indicating that the 2.6 kernel is just too big. This distribution proves that where there's a will, there's a way.
    Why should there be a will? Not every group of users is worth the amount of effort it takes to support them.

  • Text only? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by benjamindees ( 441808 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @04:02PM (#12264004) Homepage
    Where's the Linux distro that turns an old machine into something useful like a kiosk with a webbrowser?

    I've kept as much old hardware as anyone here, but honestly I'm sitting here looking at a P100 and wondering what it's still good for. A buddy of mine just threw away (in the dumpster) a bunch of running 300Mhz machines. I really can't blame him. Putting a "text only" linux distro on them isn't at all useful.

    I can re-purpose old machines as firewalls and routers all day long (no one cares if those are text-only,) but even that's getting to be a waste of time when I can buy a nice tiny new mini-atx box for $200.

    • Re:Text only? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Location of dumpster, please. When is next pickup ?

    • Re:Text only? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anubis350 ( 772791 )
      300mhz? text only? god, are you kidding? my firewall, my server for proxying into from school, and my webserver are 2 300mhz and 1 450mhz machines respectively. If I wanted to they'd run kde and gnome adequetly (yes I've tried) and they run xfce or wmaker very well if you want graphics. They also serve their current purposes that I use them for very very well. as for buying a new mini-itx machine for 200 as opposed to using old hardware... Believe it or not but these machines still eat less power and its 2
      • ok, replying to own posts is bad form, but I apologize for the formatting, slashdot removed it and I didnt hit preview first to check.
      • My point was that these are the types of machines that businesses are throwing away today, yet people are still writing software for the machines they threw away three years ago.

        I'm typing this from a P200 running Debian Testing. It will run KDE, but it's not fun. You have to remember that memory is the limiting factor in machines such as these. Businesses never upgrade memory. New Dells with P4 processors still come with only 128MB. While Windows 98 would do just fine in 64 megs of RAM, very few grap
        • While Windows 98 would do just fine in 64 megs of RAM, very few graphical environments in Linux will.

          64Meg on my Dell P150 Latitude. SuSE 8.4 + xfce3/Windowmaker run just fine. The only time it acts sluggish is when using mozilla/netscape.

          Everything else, compilers, debuggers, web server(thttpd), editors etc, run just fine.

          Enjoy,
        • And of course businesses are the only ones who would be interested in running Linux.

          7 out of my 12 machines run at 300MHz or less. Older machines are usefull and interesting to individuals, not businesses, but some of us still want a modern OS to run on them, and they still need software.

    • Re:Text only? (Score:3, Informative)

      by tengwar ( 600847 )

      I'm sitting here looking at a P100 and wondering what it's still good for.

      I use an old 133MHz machine as my web and email server. It's small, quiet, and uses little power. Since I use X to administer it from my Mac, I don't have a display or keyboard attached but I can still use the GUI. Something of this generation doesn't need a special distro - I use Suse, for instance. Yes, a mini-ATX box would do the job, but no better, so I'll hang on to my money and use the old machine.

  • Great distro (Score:2, Informative)

    by zogger ( 617870 )
    I downloaded it and tried it out awhile back. Works Great! Definetly the ticket for older hardware. Biggest problem I had was actually finding clean good floppies to burn the images to, had to go through a pile of them to get any that would work. After that though, fast boot, got online easy, surfed well.

  • A 486 is "very old?" (Score:3)

    by Karma Farmer ( 595141 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @10:21PM (#12266139)
    When did a 486 become "very old" hardware? I figured this was about old VAXen or HP-Apollo or AT&T Unix PCs. Not about a 486 sx from the mid 90's.
    • Damn Small Linux (knoppix based 50Mb d/l
      http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
      Puppy Linux (about 100MB)
      http://www.goosee.com/puppy/
      both have GUI , Puppy has Firefox and dillo
      both will run on just about anything
      • Unfortunately, many of the PCs (and especially laptops) of this era had no cd drives, or the CD drives were not bootable. Few distros support floppy installations; there are floppy boot disks, but they don't install to the HD. The floppy drives on these machines are also incredibly slow. It can take 10 minutes to boot off of floppy, but the same distribution on HD boots in seconds. Those that do support HD installation are typically based on the 2.2 kernel, and they runs at a snails pace compared to 2.6
        • Hi,

          I had a similar project with some AST laptops, I got five in Escondido (east of San Diego) for about 50$ and frankensteined the parts together into three working laptops. They were all 486-DX33's with 500MB-800MB hard-drives. I removed the laptop drives, used a laptopIDE-regularIDE adaptor ($5 or $5.95 at Frys) to connect it onto my 400MHz redhad machine and copied over a small version of slackware onto it.

          I booted it up and after approximately ten minutes, I had 6 tty consoles up running slackware w
        • Puppy has a floppy option 22 floppys AAMOF I am going to use that method to *Try* to put Linux on an old Gateway Handbook
    • I've found the BSD run much better (as in faster for running services) on microvax and HP Apollo, and even 386sx than Linux.
    • When did a 486 become "very old" hardware?

      Ten years ago. Didn't you get the memo?
  • yah i know is not with kernel 2.6.x
    Apache+php started on it ! -
    It's little slow compared with other old hardware i have (k6-2@500mhz)
    Is way faster than my very old amd 386sx (woody worked on that too !)

    I wonder how to install woody under 4M (another pc)
    maybe with Linux-tiny will work

    http://www.selenic.com/tiny-about/
  • Yup yer right Tim! I've been looking for linux to run on my old compaq 486 laptop. Thought it would be a good way to mess with linux and not screw-up my other machine that run suse.. Thanks for the heads up on this one and will download and check it out..

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